Hands-on with Gamerizon’s iPhone dice-'em-up Chop Chop Slicer

Gamerizon’s Chop Chop titles have been a big success for the Montreal-based studio, recently reaching 12 million sales in total. Yet curiously it’s never really made a title that truly lived up to the brand name.

Until now, that is.

Chop Chop Slicer does indeed feature a lot of chopping, as you play the part of a super-deformed spaceman, repelling wave after wave of alien invaders using just your fingers.

Some float around, others hover, a few zoom directly towards you, but you defeat them all in precisely the same manner: swiping the touchscreen to slice them in half.

Of course, the bobbing and weaving of said extraterrestrials is unlikely to lead to two identical portions, so to get a ‘Perfect Slice’ – resulting in an instant kill – you merely need to get a 70/30 split or better.

That’s still easier said than done, however.

The aliens (and incoming meteors) come thick and fast, and occasionally it seems that your fingers can’t quite keep up. The controls don’t feel quite as instantaneous as Fruit Ninja – that could be a by-product of the increased complexity of real-time 3D object slicing – but after a period of acclimatisation, our scores started steadily rising.

There are three different game modes. Arcade gives you three lives and a continuous barrage of alien attackers, with score bonuses for consecutive slices and an extra life per 100 points. Time Attack, meanwhile, offers a mere 60 seconds to amass the highest possible score.

Lastly, Perfect Slice mode counts sequences of immaculate swipes, with each missed cut moving onto the next round, with ten in total. For our money, this is the most compelling high score chase of the lot, with a real satisfaction gleaned from successive slicing successes.

With Game Center and OpenFeint support, not to mention Facebook and Twitter connectivity, it has a decent feature set for a casual time-killer. Its art style may turn off as many as it wins over, but presentation-wise, it’s no slouch.

Like Gamerizon’s other titles, Chop Chop Slicer doesn’t look like it’ll change the world (in fact, it looks pretty garish for the most part), but it’s another solid effort that will probably top up that impressive sales tally rather nicely.

Chop Chop Slicer will slash its way onto the App Store on June 9th. If you can't wait two days, check out the trailer below.

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